我国入境旅游发展现状、趋势预测及策略分析

通过对1997—2006年我国旅游服务贸易出口国际市场占有率指数、旅游服务贸易竞争优势指数和显示性比较优势指数的比较，可以看出我国旅游服务贸易国际竞争力尚不强。结合1978—2007我国历年入境旅游人次和外汇收入数据，通过建立时间序列模型，可以对未来五年我国入境旅游发展趋势进行预测。建议根据我国入境旅游消费结构特征，采用从宏观上实行差异化引导等策略。     

Rent, risk, and replication: Preference adaptation in winner-take-all markets

We study the evolution of an economy where agents who are heterogeneous with respect to risk attitudes can either earn a certain income or enter a risky rent-seeking contest. We assume that agents behave rationally given their preferences, but that the population distribution of preferences evolves over time in response to material payoffs. We show that, in particular, initial distributions with full support converge to stationary states where all types are still present. Although rents are perfectly dissipated in material terms at a steady state, efficiency is greater than if everybody had been risk neutral, since risk lovers specialize in rent seeking.     

Fixed Exchange Rates and Disinflation in Emerging Markets: How Large Is the Effect?

We examine developing countries which have institutional quality ratings for the effects of exchange rate rigidity on inflation. The level of institutional development exerts no effect on the impact of currency regimes. However, the interaction of institutional quality and exchange rates has, in the most plausible specifications, a negative impact on inflation. This suggests that fixed exchange rates exert at most a contingent effect on inflation, and indicates that countries in Eastern Europe and Latin America contemplating currency pegs would be better off improving institutional quality prior to adopting the euro or dollar and expecting a large subsequent disinflationary effect. JEL no.  F31, O11     

The negative trade-off between risk and incentives: Evidence from the american whaling industry

This paper analyzes the trade-off between risk and incentives in the share contracts of the American whaling industry. Using a newly collected panel of 5378 individuals who sailed on more than 1000 whaling voyages from 1855–68, the response of sailors’ compensation to an increase in risk is estimated. The risks used to identify this response resulted from the commerce-raiding naval vessels of the Confederacy during the Civil War. As the Confederate cruisers sailed primarily in the Atlantic, and therefore posed far less of a threat to whaling voyages to other oceans, a quasi-experimental approach focusing on the differences between Atlantic voyages compared to others is implemented. The results are consistent with a negative trade-off between risk and incentives in the industry’s contracts. Moreover, evidence is found of selection among less risk-averse sailors and merchants into riskier voyages during the war.     

Decomposition of Fraud‐Risk Assessments and Auditors' Sensitivity to Fraud Cues*

Practitioners and regulators are concerned that when auditors perceive management's attitude or character as indicative of low fraud risk, they are not sufficiently sensitive to high levels of incentive or opportunity risks in their overall fraud‐risk assessments. In this study, we examine whether a fraud‐triangle decomposition of fraud‐risk assessments (that is, separately assessing attitude, opportunity, and incentive risks prior to assessing overall fraud risk) increases auditors' sensitivity to opportunity and incentive cues when perceptions of management's attitude suggest low fraud risk. In an experiment with 52 practicing audit managers, we find that auditors who decompose fraud‐risk assessments are more sensitive to opportunity and incentive cues when making their overall assessments than auditors who simply make an overall fraud‐risk assessment. However, this increased sensitivity to opportunity and incentive cues appears to happen only when those cues suggest low fraud risk. When opportunity and incentive cues suggest high fraud risk, auditors are equally sensitive to those cues whether they use a decomposition or a holistic approach. We discuss and examine potential explanations for this finding.     

Asymmetric volatility in the foreign exchange markets

We examine the presence or absence of asymmetric volatility in the exchange rates of Australian dollar (AUD), Euro (EUR), British pound (GBP) and Japanese yen (JPY), all against US dollar. Our investigation is based on a variant of the heterogeneous autoregressive realized volatility model, using daily realized variance and return series from 1996 to 2004. We find that a depreciation against USD leads to significantly greater volatility than an appreciation for AUD and GBP, whereas the opposite is true for JPY. Relative to volatility on days following a positive one-standard-deviation return, volatility on days following a negative one-standard-deviation return is higher by 6.6% for AUD, 6.1% for GBP, and 21.2% for JPY. The realized volatility of EUR appears to be symmetric. These results are robust to the removal of jump component from realized volatility and the sub-samplings defined by structural-changes. The asymmetry in AUD, GBP and JPY appears to be embedded in the continuous component of realized volatility rather than the jump component.     

THEORIES OF CHOICE UNDER IGNORANCE AND UNCERTAINTY

Abstract. In this paper, Knight's distinction between risk and uncertainty, and its significance for economic analysis are examined. The paper consists of a survey of some recent developments on the theory of choice under uncertainty and some applications of these theories to problems for which Bayesian Decision Theory has not proved entirely satisfactory. Two problems are examined in detail. The first is that of finance and insurance and the second is that of risktaking behaviour with special emphasis on lotteries.     

Global sourcing strategy and sustainable competitive advantage

Global sourcing strategy has been one of the most hotly debated management trends in the last 20 years. In its early years, global sourcing was examined mostly from “in-house” development and procurement perspectives; and in the last several years, research focus has shifted to “outsourcing” activities. Along with this shift from internal to external focus on global sourcing, many researchers and business practitioners have applied a core competency argument to justify increased levels of outsourcing activities on a global basis. Although the beneficial aspects of outsourcing are assumed in most cases, no consensus exists in reality as to the effect of outsourcing. Furthermore, the increased instability of the exchange rate environment in the last several years has also led to increased difficulties in managing globally scattered operations that were once fashionable in the 1980s-90s under the rubric of global strategy. In this article, the authors explore potential limitations and negative consequences of outsourcing strategy on a global scale.